


A Right Good-Will Draught

by sunsmasher



Series: HSWC Fills [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol, F/F, F/M, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, and all the other trolls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 11:45:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/836516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year begins and ends in the dark, but that's more fun, anyways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Right Good-Will Draught

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt:
> 
> _Dave <>Jade<>John<>Rose_
> 
> _I think you and my friends_   
>  _should hang out on the weekends_   
>  _\- Skrillex; Weekends_

At 8:30, Dave fumbles the lighter against the bowl when Jade presses the pipe into his hands. He coughs on the smoke, too, to the tune of Jade's deep, not unkind laughter and John's hand clapped against his back and Rose's smirking huff.

John tips the pipe from his fingers as Dave hacks into his collar, back pressed against the chilled, bare cement of the steps, knocking his knees against Jade's ankles and Rose's shoulders in the narrow alley. There's not much room in the short, high-walled staircase between John's kitchen and his garage for four gangly seventeen-year-olds, their elbows, their knees, and their weed of surprisingly high quality (Jade—somehow—knows a guy), but it's open to the night sky above and the draft pulls their smoke up to the stars. There's a foot of snow out in the yard and the woods, and the pot's heady against the smack of winter.

"It seems your coolkid reputation betrays you, Dave," Rose smiles as Dave puts out a hand for the beer they're passing counter to the pipe, wiping at his mouth between coughs. The smoke is harsh in his throat but Jade's doing tricks as she tips her head back to the open air, puffing rings in rings in rings as Dave catches his breath. Even John fumbles his way through a french inhale, smoke out through the mouth and in through the nose, and you gotta wonder how true the "party boat" joke was, watching these nerds toke up like they've spent years doing it. 

"No idea what you're on about, sis," Dave shoots back, only the slightest of rasps belying his monotone confidence, "I took seminal do-it-yourself sitcom Home Improvement's Very Special Episode straight to heart, just like all the other good little boys and girls. Were it not for all yalls disgusting influence I'd still be untouched by the satanic taint of the mary jane, pure and virgin as the fresh-fallen snow."

Rose smiles around her cigarette, and John laughs, 

"Man, Dave, you sure do like talking about taints. Does that sound suspicious to you, Rose?"

"Oh, without a doubt, John. An obvious symptom of a diseased, dangerously-sex-crazed mind. Perhaps even signs of a childhood obsession with one's own giant butt."

"You fuckers, I leave you the beautiful springboard of my potential maidenhood, nigh pregnant with hilarity, and you go straight for the ain't your dick ain't your ass jokes."

"Truly, our comedic genius is beyond your ken."

"And what's the fun in low-hanging fruit?" Jade asks with a lazy grin, hair tangled with smoke.

"Fuck you guys, I'm going inside," Dave says, and doesn't move an inch. His legs are warm where they press against Jade's and the beer tastes like chocolate.

\--

At 9:00, in a wreath of pot, tobacco, and fine chocolate beer, they open the door. 

Terezi's over the threshold first, punctual as the Reaper, and Dave's back against the wall with her tongue in his mouth before Sollux and the Skittles vodka have even made it up the stairs. Kanaya follows behind, surreptitiously nibbling on the double-stuff Oreos, Aradia already drifting towards the Kahlua.

Karkat's last, ten minutes slow, grumbling about parking in John's sorry excuse for an upper-middle-class shitstain neighborhood, did this planet never understand the marvel of parking structures, sweet fuck, but then John puts his mouth on his so Karkat's quiet and that's better. Rose asks Kanaya, from the side of her mouth as Karkat blushes a resplendent shade of red, "Why did you even let him drive?" and Kanaya holds up four fingers, ticking one down for each incapable troll, "Terezi is very blind, Sollux has no eyes, and I have acquired your habit for embarrassing myself while imbibing alcoholic beverages."

"And Aradia?"

"She crosses the divider to get to the other side."

"Ah," Rose says, with a mild shrug and the smallest twitch to the corner of her lips, "Well, I suppose you could have found a worse chauffeur."

"No," Kanaya returns, staring into the middle distance with a face truly befitting a veteran of the apocalypse, "We could not."

Rose twines her fingers in Kanaya's, grey on brown, and pulls her to the kitchen. "Come drink," she smiles, more than she smiles most nights, "I'll make you forget your woes."

\--

By 10:00 the rest have come and the intoxicants have spread, in shots and hits and games of king's cup as tense as October 1962 (Vriska got King and decreed no man should drink without first removing the little man from the rim of his cup, which did Tavros in in a matter of minutes) so when Jade pushes Feferi into the closet, hissing "Shhhhh, they'll hear you!" into her ear-fin as Fef giggles and paws at Jade's breast, they're both as languid and loopy as the weed will take them. Hide-and-go-seek spreads like a virus, every man and troll among them ducking for dark corners and unobtrusive wardrobes as Eridan stalks about the house, roaring, "OLLY-OLLY-OX-EN-FREE!"

Jade presses Feferi into the light coats and summer shoes of John's dad's third-floor closet, lips against lips (and sometimes throat and collarbone and cool skin between breasts), and pushes a hand down Feferi's skirts.

"Don't worry," Jade whispers, smile clear even in the dim light that seeps around the closet door, "they'll never find us up here!"

"I wasn't perchcisely worried," Feferi hisses back and bucks up into Jade's seeking fingers. God, it feels good in the warm and the dark. "Eridan's dumb as a barnacle."

"And got a dick twice as tiny?"

"Three times! He showed me once, you know, it was horribubble."

"Oh my gawd, I can't imagine," Jade laughs, and makes Feferi groan against her shoulder.

(The game ends when Karkat, in a fit of rage over something (most likely the incredible dust in John’s closet or the truly despicable blueness of his eyes) unseats a dumbbell on an upper shelf, which then drops and cracks against John’s forehead, which then bleeds profusely upon the carpet, and Kanaya sources the Oxiclean as Rose checks for a concussion and Nepeta and Equius help each other drunkenly pad a wet paper towel against the bloodstains as Karkat frets himself into a flopsweat, as John grins as wide as his cheeks can stretch the entire time, because he’s been hurt before but it’s been a long time since he was so doted upon)

(By the time Jade and Feferi realize hide-and-go-seek has come and gone John’s Dad’s summer shoes are beyond help and the entire third floor smells like alien-on-alien debauchery)

(“Gross,” says John.)

\--

At 12:00, which is midnight, which is the actual purpose for this party, to ring in the beautiful post-apocalyptic new year, they all sit on the couch and watch the fireworks. They could maybe sit by the window to see the show in 4-D, or try for the roof, but the TV has Auld Lang Syne and a glittering ball (the kids, in a fit of kindness, do not explain the broadcast delay from Times Square), so they sit on the couch and watch fireworks around the world and cheer into the screen. John, Karkat, Sollux and Aradia bunch onto the couch, with Jade, Feferi, Rose and Kanaya sitting against their legs (respectively) and Dave and Terezi somehow squeezed between the wall and the sofa (so that they might better pick the blood clots from John’s hair and make out where no one’s looking) and everyone else drapes themselves across the floor. Everyone counts down to midnight, although the trolls haven’t quite grasped why, and everyone sings Auld Lang Syne, although not even the kids know the proper words, and everyone kisses at midnight right on the dot, which everyone comprehends. New love and new beginnings, as not a single saying goes, but it’s close enough.

\-- 

At 1:30, when it is, just for the moment, John and Jade and Dave and Rose again (Karkat having, for a brief second, left John and his head wound alone, and Kanaya having fretted after Karkat, and Terezi making intimate with the Skittles vodka and Feferi likely communing with the great and eldritch beyond), they sit in the spare room and pass Aradia’s hookah around the circle.

“Show me how to do the tricky shit,” Dave says, as Rose pops clouds of smoke from her black-lined lips.

“Perhaps when you’re older,” Rose smiles, smoke leaking through every gap in her teeth. 

The shisha is guava-flavoured, another of Jade’s finds, and Jade herself chucks her fingers against Dave’s chin to press his lips against hers and teaches him how to shotgun, his mouth slack on hers in more shock than he’d care to admit to. 

“Take a hit and pass it to John,” Jade smiles, two knuckles knocking Dave’s mouth shut before he can cough the smoke out. His shades are long-since appropriated by some troll or another (Terezi) so his eyes are visibly wide as John turns him about and sucks the next hit from his lips, one hand on Dave’s shoulder and one already going for the hose dropping from Dave’s fingers. 

“Don’t make it weird, man,” John grins as Dave splutters, “We’re all super relationshipped.”

“Yeah,” Dave laughs, as John tries to pass smoke to Rose and instead dissolves into snorts as she plucks his glasses from his nose and he tickles long fingers against her ribs, “Yeah, I guess we are.”

Dave leans back against the spare bed (they’ll fit Aradia and Sollux into it later, to save the rest of the party from some explicit goddamn hand-on-cheek action) and rests his head against Jade’s shoulder. She pats his forehand with one hand, pinching dark a carpet-bound spark from the coals with the other. John scoots around to settle against her other shoulder, sneaking one more hit before he hangs the hose on the hookah’s base, and pulls Rose close with his free hand. She comes not reluctantly, laying her head upon Dave’s crossed legs and her back on John and Jade’s, relaxing piece by piece as the smoke and Dave’s fingers against her scalp do their work, humming something incomprehensible in the back of her throat.

“Let’s—” Dave starts, hand never stilling in Rose’s hair, “Let’s just stay here. For a while.”

“OK,” says John, and Jade and Rose. 

“The others can find us,” says Jade,

“They know where we are,” says Rose.

“Good,” says Dave, for the most part forgetting why he asked this question, or what the question once was, choosing instead to press his nose against Jade’s collar and trace his fingers around the shell of Rose’s ear and listen to John laugh at joke he hasn’t bothered to tell anyone. “That’s good.”


End file.
